Pipelight 0.2.1
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2013-10-31
We are happy to announce Pipelight 0.2.1 which brings support for new plugins and improves the usabillity of the existing ones. The new plugins added in this release are the Shockwave Player (not to be confused with Flash) and the Unity Webplayer. They still need to be considered as experimental but we decided to include them anyway since they already work flawless with a lot of games. A more extensive summary of the changes follows.
--[Shockwave Player]--
This release brings support for Shockwave which works quiet good with the content we tested, but there are still some games which have problems with mouse or keyboard input. The installation of the plugin is done the same way as the other plugins, simply execute
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable shockwave
and Shockwave should get installed on the next start of your browser. The first time you start the plugin you should do a right click on the plugin and select OpenGL as renderer since the DirectX renderer does not work. Moreover it is also recommended to open the settings and disable the backwards compatibility which fixes the input problems for the most games. These options are set by Pipelight after the plugin is installed, but for some reason Shockwave sometimes resets the settings on the first start.
More information and a link to a test game is available at http://
--[Unity Webplayer]--
The Unity player is still a bit experimental since Wine lacks some features which are needed by Unity and we use some hackfixes to get around these issues. Anyway almost all tested games (for example all demos on the unity website) worked without issues and we only found one game which didn't work at all. The installation can be done via
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable unity3d
and depending on the site you want to use, you will also need to use a user agent switcher. Surprisingly the Unity Website works only if you select Safari and Mac OS X as User agent. They most probably also check the navigator.platform field which is not set by most of the user agent switchers.
Some games which require large downloads at the initialization sometimes fail to download all the data at once and you will see an error message. Although it is annoying, the problem can be easily solved by reloading the page and Unity will continue to download the data at the position where it stopped. More information about Unity is available at http://
--[Flash Click-Through]--
We fixed an annoying bug which sometimes happened when you have multiple tabs with Flash content opened and the Flash windows were at the same position. Depending on the order in which the windows were created it was possible that you controlled an invisible flash application in the background instead of the visible one. This problem was related to the fact that Wine didn't notice that the browser made the window invisible on a tab change. This is now fixed and shouldn't happen any more.
--[Keyboard Input]--
Plugins which used the windowless mode (a NPAPI term) had problems with keyboard input and it was not possible to enter characters. This problem was only experienced by a small amount of users since Silverlight normally doesn't use this mode, but got more attention with Flash which uses windowless by default. We were able to find the problem in the event handling and the bug should be fixed now.
--[Static linking]--
Pipelight up to version 0.2.0 linked the windows part dynamically against the mingw runtime which had the disadvantage that we had a dependency on the full mingw cross compiler since the four needed libraries were not available as single package. We switched now to static linking so that this dependency is no longer needed and it should be possible to get some disk space back by executing apt-get autoremove after the update.
--[Flash hardware acceleration / 3D]--
This release will automatically switch your pipelight flash settings to use hardware rendering for Stage 3D content. This still causes some problems with games as the DirectX -> OpenGL layer of Wine introduces flickering, but these problems don't occur for videos. Since the most flash games which use Stage 3D are unusable slow in software rendering, it is unlikely that this change will have disadvantages for the most users. You can verify that it works by opening a youtube video in fullscreen and taking a look at the statistics, which should show accelerated video rendering. GPU decoding is still not supported since Wine doesn't support DXVA.
--[Popup menu / Embed / Stay in fullscreen]--
If you make a right click on a plugin and it is not in fullscreen mode you will notice that we extended the menu entries of the original plugin with some Pipelight related functions. First of all you should see a new entry which shows the version of Pipelight you are using and will take you to the launchpad site when you click on it. The next two options allow you to temporarily change some settings of Pipelight.
The embed entry defines whether the plugin should be shown in external window. This is useful for Silverlight applications which either show the video at a fixed size or fullscreen mode since the external window can be resized. Our intentional idea was to switch this mode on the fly, but it causes a lot of problems with Wine and the options therefore only affects the next start of a plugin and will be reset when the browser starts a new plugin process. Reloading the page normally doesn't spawn a new process and should behave as expected.
The next option is especially interesting for people with multiple screens since Silverlight and Flash leave the fullscreen mode when they loose focus and you can now prevent this behavior by enabling the stay in fullscreen option. In contrary to Silverlights "stay in fullscreen" implementation this does not only work with websites which request it, but with all of them.
--[NTLM Authentication]--
This release no longer relies on the wininet version provided by Wine but instead we now use a version provided by the internet explorer. The reason for this is that the Wine implementation has several problems with NTLM HTTP authentication scheme and breaks Silverlight applications relying on it. The handshake is still done by Wine and you need to have ntlm_auth installed to get it working (this is provided by the winbind package on Ubuntu) but the http connection handling is now done correctly. One Silverlight application which benefits from this change is the RavenDB client.
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If you want to see a list with all changes take a look at the the full changelog:
https:/
Updated .
